Team New Zealand expressed muted approval of Valencia as the next America's Cup venue yesterday, but said it was not yet certain it would be at the startline of a 2007 regatta.
Team head Grant Dalton said he was not surprised the Spanish port had been chosen to host the first European Cup regatta in more than 150 years, adding the former Cup-holders were already working on an analysis of Valencia's wind and sea conditions.
"As long as we can get a great big satellite dish to watch the [rugby] I don't care where it is," Dalton said.
"Valencia, Marseilles, Timbuktu -- it's all the same to us."
New Zealand held the America's Cup from 1995 to 2003, losing it in March to the Swiss syndicate Alinghi, which made its venue announcement in Geneva on Wednesday.
Dalton said it had been widely rumored Valencia would be chosen as the venue, although the French port of Marseilles had made a strong late bid to snatch the event.
He had elected not to attend the venue announcement in Geneva but, rather, to "stay at the coalface," concentrating on his continued effort to win sponsorship for Team New Zealand's bid to reclaim the Cup.
The team has given itself until March 31 to determine the financial viability of a 2007 challenge. Dalton said if Team New Zealand was unable to find the sponsorship it considered necessary for a challenge, it would not be among teams competing in Valencia.
"We're not going there on a broken wing," he said.
"I live in a world of sponsorship where the glass is always half empty. We've got to find an enormous amount of money and I can't say at the moment we'll be there."
Team New Zealand estimates it would need NZ$150 million (US$93 million) to mount a viable challenge this year. Dalton said he was working hard with potential sponsors to put together that amount. He would not say what funding, if any, was in place at the moment.
"I feel good about it but not overconfident," he said.
"In this business a couple of phone calls can literally change your world in 10 seconds and those phone calls have not been made yet."
Dalton said the New Zealand team that competes in Valencia will necessarily be different to the one which lost, 5-0, to Alinghi in March.
"When this team is announced, there will be significant talent there -- in some cases grizzled," he said.
"There is a very different Team New Zealand developing at the moment."
Dalton said Team New Zealand's weather expert, Australian-born Roger "Clouds" Badham, had already made a trip to Valencia to study weather conditions.
Team New Zealand doubted Valencia's winds were as steady or predictable as Alinghi had tried to suggest.
"Our info is, and we have right here, right now a Spanish guy who just happens to be working with us from Valencia, and he says it's quite shifty," he said.
Revelations of positive doping tests for nearly two dozen Chinese swimmers that went unpunished sparked an intense flurry of accusations and legal threats between the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) and the head of the US drug-fighting organization, who has long been one of WADA’s fiercest critics. WADA on Saturday said it was turning to legal counsel to address a statement released by US Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) CEO Travis Tygart, who said WADA and anti-doping authorities in China swept positive tests “under the carpet by failing to fairly and evenly follow the global rules that apply to everyone else in the world.” The
Taiwanese judoka Yang Yung-wei on Saturday won silver in the men’s under-60kg category at the Asian Judo Championships in Hong Kong. Nicknamed the “judo heartthrob” in Taiwan, the Olympic silver-medalist missed out on his first Asian Championships gold when he lost to Japanese judoka Taiki Nakamura in the finals. Yang defeated three opponents on Saturday to reach the final after receiving a bye through the round of 32. He first topped Laotian Soukphaxay Sithisane in the round of 16 with two seoi nage (over-the-shoulder throws), then ousted Indian Vijay Kumar Yadav in the quarter-finals with his signature ude hishigi sankaku gatame (triangular armlock). He
RALLY: It was only the second time the Taiwanese has partnered with Kudermetova, and the match seemed tight until they won seven points in a row to take the last set 10-2 Taiwan’s Chan Hao-ching and Russia’s Veronika Kudermetova on Sunday won the Porsche Tennis Grand Prix women’s doubles final in Stuttgart, Germany. The pair defeated Norway’s Ulrikke Eikeri and Estonia’s Ingrid Neel 4-6, 6-3, 10-2 in a tightly contested match at the WTA 500 tournament. Chan and Kudermetova fell 4-6 in the first set after having their serve broken three times, although they played increasingly well. They fought back in the second set and managed to break their opponents’ serve in the eighth game to triumph 6-3. In the tiebreaker, Chan and Kudermetova took a 3-0 lead before their opponents clawed back two points, but
Taiwanese gymnast Lee Chih-kai failed to secure an Olympic berth in the pommel horse following a second-place finish at the last qualifier in Doha on Friday, a performance that Lee and his coach called “unconvincing.” The Tokyo Olympics silver medalist finished runner-up in the final after scoring 6.6 for degree of difficulty and 8.800 for execution for a combined score of 15.400. That was just 0.100 short of Jordan’s Ahmad Abu Al Soud, who had qualified for the event in Paris before the Apparatus World Cup series in Qatar’s capital. After missing the final rounds in the first two of four qualifier